“the trailer featured no shortage of swashbuckling adventurers: the talking raccoon, the green woman, three white guys named Chris, a blonde Scarlett Johansson, and even the Sony-mandated white and straight Spider-Man. But with all of those dang Avengers lined up to save Earth, I was frustrated to not see a single Hispanic person on the team.

“There are almost 58 million Latinos in the U.S., but none of them made the trailer. Was Marvel saving them for the post-credits scene?”

Who’s to blame: Marvel, or us?

In America, capitalism caters to whites, blacks, and everyone else that isn’t white or black. Asians and Latinos are there, sort of. If we’re lucky we get to be cast as an extra in a commercial, the best friend in a movie, perhaps. The most visible Latino in the entire Marvel Universe is the best friend from Ant-Man – quick, what was his name?

That’s what I thought.

Why is that? We all know why white people get to be the leads – white supremacist culture and all that, goes with the territory. But why do black people get more representation than other POCs?

My guess is simply that no other culture in the US has fought harder to assert their rights and human dignity than black people. Black people have fought the yolk of oppression for generations. After a long, bitter, bloody, hard-fought war against white supremacy that continues to this day, what they got was inclusion. They’re still more likely to be targets of police brutality, more likely to face discrimination both open and covert, more likely to be passed up for jobs and promotions, but at the very least they now get a token of respect and some representation.

Mexicans, on the other hand…well, you can get away with calling Mexicans rapists and in Arizona you can stop us in the middle of the street and demand to see papers – hell, Jan Brewer and Donald Trump built successful political careers out of doing that. But if you ask Latinos who our civic heroes are, I guarantee you the names that come up can be counted on one hand, and for most people, even Latinos, that list starts and ends with Cesar Chavez.

Here’s the thing: I get the sense that most Latinos don’t even know what Cesar Chavez is famous for. I know who he is. I think 50% of my sisters might know who he is, and I’ma keep it real, probably 25% of my cousins will know who he is. I dare not even venture to guess what percentage of Latino youth know who he is.

Am I wrong? I fucking hope so. Because political apathy seems to me to be the problem. I can’t even blame the parents, either; contrary to what passes for conservative thought, Mexicans are the hardest working people I know. It ain’t easy to be political when you hustle that hard and try to raise kids. I don’t work nearly as hard as my parents do, and I sure as fuck don’t know what it’s like to raise kids, so I have the luxury of being more invested in this political crap than our fathers were. But I see a LOT of Latinos my generation or younger that don’t have that excuse – to them I say, wake the fuck up, ya know. Give a damn. Because black people weren’t handed representation in film and media, they EARNED it. Maybe it’s time for us to do the same.

For the record, I didn’t know his name either, but the Mexican in Ant-man was “Luis” and he was played by Michael Peña.

Establishment Dems are now smearing progressives with the “alt-left” tag to draw a moral equivalency with bigots and fascists. Alternative lefty media has always existed as a counter to mainstream corporate media, so I don’t reject the label. In SF, the San Francisco Bay Guardian shone a light on the crony Dems FROM a leftist perspective while the establishment-friendly Chronicle kissed their ass. So yeah, I’d rather be alt-left any day. What I reject is the cynical timing of their new little talking point.

So let’s see: the alt-right wants minorities to die; the alt-left wants everyone to have health care; and the corrupt, sellout, crony capitalist establishment and their cowardly apologists take the middle road…so fewer deaths, but only for economic reasons, because racist reasons are evil. Ya gotta compromise.

Hey sellouts: if both the alt-left and alt-right represent emerging populist attitudes against establishment politicians, doesn’t that just make you alt-relevant?

The Charlottesville protests went from “nah we’re not racists” to “yeah, we’re all Nazis, but not killers”, to “okay, we’re killers”. Trump is a symptom of a problem that was allowed to fester for too long. Conservatives have been allowed to slip into fascism and they don’t even know it.

But what did you expect when the left embraced neoliberalism? Where was the right wing to go but even further right?

Yes, I’m also blaming fake liberals for Charlottesville.

You are the Reagan Republicans now; where did You expect conservatives to go? How were they to define themselves against you after you conceded the economic argument to them and staked a claim into their ideological territory? You pushed the conversation to the right while still keeping social issues, never realizing how the two go hand in hand. The conversation moved to the right even as the social fabric in the nation moved to the left, in favor of diversity, representation, LGBT rights, and so on.

But when the right went fascist, it wasn’t just their economic principles that went right, it was everything. The echo chamber that gave them a home (Fox News, Breitbart, Stormfront) also told them that the social movements were evil, that their heritage was under attack, that Obama was a Muslim who came to take their guns.

What did you think would happens when that radicalized right found themselves in the middle of a social order that they didn’t recognize as their own? You got Charlottesville.

That’s not to say that the left must ease up on social change – hell no! We must double down. We must get angrier, more hostile towards hate speech, bigotry, racism, and unprincipled Islamophobia (that’s the singling out of one religion as opposed to criticism of all religions).

But if we are to stop conservatives from falling off the edge, then the economic message must also shift left. The fascists will never move; they’ve chosen their side. The shift will speak to those who feel the Democrats (and in their minds, by extension the left) doesn’t care about their economic needs). The right stole populism from us; we must take it back. We must abandon these phony, corporate Democrats, let them go join the Republicans – hell, maybe as GOP they can turn conservatism around instead of dragging progressives to the right.

Time to beat these fascists back. Conservatives, now you get to decide if you’re one of them…or an American.

If you want to see a guy verbally jerking you off, listen to Chuck Schumer talk about his great new vision for the Democratic party. God, these people are hopeless.

HOPELESS!

And the DNC has already chosen their standard bearer for 2020. It’s not Bernie or Warren. It’s gonna be Kamala Harris. It makes perfect sense. She looks the part. She’s good branding. She’s also friendly with the machine. Kamala Harris is a corporate machine politician through and through. In San Francisco she allied herself with the Willie Brown/Gavin Newsom/Dianne Feinstein/Nancy Pelosi wing of the Democratic party. They are not true progressives. They wine and dine each other, attend all the same fundraisers, hobknob it up with power and fame; they belong to the same exclusive club – and you are not a part of it.

Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be caught dead at one of their little fundraisers with these fake ass so-called liberals. That’s why true progressives and even some conservatives respect Bernie. Many of us might not be able to articulate why we were so drawn to Bernie, but I do believe that his sincere allegiance to we the people, as opposed to they the affluent, is the reason he’s so loved. But instead of a real progressive, we’re going to get more of this corporate bullshit.

So now they’re grooming Harris to be the president, as if it’s a done deal, as if we’re just supposed to accept her as our standard bearer because they say so. I say we can do better than her. I’m pre-emptively striking against Kamala Harris – if she’s the DNC nominee, fuck it, I’ll vote Green again.

ENOUGH rewarding corporate politicians for pledging allegiance to money and power!WE CAN DO BETTER.